"The Mystery Plays"

Fantastic Four comic book writer and Yale playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa steals from The Twilight Zone, H.P. Lovecraft, and Hitchcock in his bid to be the theatrical heir to M. Night Shyamalan. This slick production is actually two otherworldly plays about mystery, sin, dark secrets, and, as one character puts it, what happens to human beings when "God [is] looking the other way." In The Filmmakers Mystery a Hollywood director (T. Edward Webster) is haunted by a ghost after finding himself the sole survivor of a gruesome train crash -- think Shyamalan's Unbreakable, complete with twist ending. This is followed by Ghost Children, which explores the bloody ties and secrets between an attorney (Cristina Anselmo) and her brother (Chris Yule), who's serving life in jail for the murder of their parents. The superb cast (with standout Rod Gnapp as the Rod Serling-like narrator) and sci-fi production values create an engaging eeriness, but the potential for real creepiness is lost in Aguirre-Sacasa's script, which plays like a stylized, staged reading of a screenplay, relying too heavily on a protagonist's first-person narrative while all the juicy action happens offstage. Perhaps this is why the playwright is currently working on a big movie deal.